MarTech Edge Interview with David Greenberg, Chief Marketing Officer, Conversica

Welcome, David! Your experience in marketing spans over 25 years. Give us a peek into the formative years of your career that ultimately led you to the role of CMO at Conversica.

I am passionate about both the art and science blend that marketing offers and about leveraging technologies to create significant step-changes in the business. It all began with my dad, who was also a marketeer, and I got used to listening to his business conversations, which fascinated me and fueled my interest. This exposure laid the foundation for the career I aspired to pursue. Beginning as a practitioner, I immersed myself in diverse disciplines, actively engaging in demand generation, branding, and go-to-market strategies during the early stages of my professional journey.

The position I had before joining Conversica in 2022 was as CMO at Act-On Software, where I was responsible for the overall strategy and execution of the Marketing and Product functions. Before this role, I held numerous senior executive positions across groundbreaking organizations such as Jive Software, Airship, and Liveops.

Overall, I have over 20 years of experience as a Marketing and Go-To-Market leader with deep expertise in building high-growth organizations that disrupt the 'old way' of doing things. 

Can you elaborate on the impact of Conversica Revenue Digital Assistants (RDAs) and how they have empowered marketing, sales, and customer success teams to enhance their interactions with leads and customers, ultimately resulting in improved revenue outcomes?

They are empowering these teams and upscaling their tasks by increasing their funnel conversions across their respective disciplines. For example, in marketing, RDAs help marketers increase their conversion from leads to revenue, etc.

They do this by…

Conversica's RDAs were built to have meaningful, two-way, revenue-influencing conversations with customers at any time of their lifecycle. They can autonomously perform business objectives according to the use case and needs of our customers. With Generative AI powers (launched even before the ChatGPT frenzy), they can support human teams in doing time-consuming but essential tasks while freeing up time so the team can focus on strategic activities, such as building relationships and closing deals. 

They are a huge game changer for companies looking to enhance their workforce and unlock revenue opportunities that would remain untouched otherwise. RDAs can contact hundreds of people simultaneously, which is impossible for a sales, marketing, or CS team to do.

Additionally, with over a decade of expertise in AI and billions of revenue-centric interactions training its RDAs in every channel, the platform has evolved and learned how to influence and persuade customers and prospects throughout their buyer lifecycle. Conversica's RDAs offer an average of 24x return on investment, 40-50% conversion rates, and 10x pipeline growth.

In the context of Conversica, could you provide your perspective on the definition of demand generation and shed light on the specific strategies you've implemented to stimulate interest and create demand for your products/services?

Demand generation often gets confused with lead generation, but it is much bigger than that. Demand generation is about implementing strategies and tactics that build interest and desire to purchase your product. It is multi-dimensional. So, I think of it holistically - awareness, leads, post-purchase.

Key strategies we've implemented:

• Thought leadership - in our context, it has been about leading key issues in AI like ethics and chatbot satisfaction.
• Targeted demand gen - focused on key verticals and "Ideal Account Profile." As a growing company, we need to focus our dollars, so really focus more energy on these.
• Retention / Customer growth - i.e., investing in our community and ensuring there is a place for them to talk and share about best practices, new products, new use cases…

Our Powerfully Human™ conversation technology engages users in a humanlike way throughout the buyer lifecycle across all communication channels. These capabilities make Conversica's AI automation solutions mission-critical to customers of all sizes. We also have been working on strong partnerships all over the world. We launched earlier this year a partner program in which partner companies can sell our products and, along with us, even develop tailored solutions for use cases. We also have been working with Salesforce and recently announced the integration of our RDAs with their Marketing Cloud. This is a game-changer now that companies that already use the Salesforce environment can enhance their marketing programs through campaigns created using Conversica's solutions.

Integrated marketing programs are essential for comprehensive marketing strategies. Could you provide an example of a successful integrated marketing campaign you devised & led at Conversica?

With Conversica's launch of next-gen chat, we launched an integrated campaign to support it. While there were many components to this, we really took an integrated approach across PR, thought leadership content, and digital lead gen. This is a summary of how we strategized about these areas:

• PR - With the introduction of ChatGPT and the increasing familiarity of the general public with Generative AI, I spearheaded an initiative to launch our Generative AI chat tool, Conversica Chat. This catapulted Conversica into the media as the first company to launch the first GPT-powered enterprise-ready chat solution.
• Thought leadership content - Pioneering the enterprise-ready chat solution powered by PT has opened doors for us to enhance our thought leadership content. We now leverage our extensive experience as trusted authorities for those seeking expertise in this space.
• Digital lead gen - Working closely with our communication, marketing, and PR teams, we not only garnered significant media coverage but also generated an array of valuable resources for our website. Consequently, we witnessed a surge in new customer acquisition, as well as existing clients eager to adopt this innovative tool.

How is the integration of Conversica's generative AI conversational platform with Salesforce Marketing Cloud significantly impacting sales conversations and what noteworthy changes or advancements have you observed as a result of this Integration?

The combination of Conversica with Marketing Automation is going to be the new powerhouse. With the combination, marketing teams can now run their funnel and control conversion much more powerfully and at scale because they can deliver a 2-way experience with leads. Instead of traditional "MQLs," Conversica delivered 'conversation qualified leads' (CQLs), which are much higher quality and convert much faster. MAP without this is only one way and relies heavily on human horsepower and intervention.

The impact our clients that use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud report to us is impressive. One of them, Leica Geosystems, part of Hexagon, has implemented an RDA for marketing and had a 300% increase in their net-new lead to qualified lead conversions and 23x ROI, with 12% of their total opportunity value influenced by their RDA. For this use case, Conversica was a winner of the 2023 Salesforce Partner Innovation Awards.

To what extent is your role at Conversica pivotal in fostering collaboration with sales teams and devising effective sales enablement strategies, and how does this contribute to the organization's overall success?

The marketing, product, and sales teams work in a tight-knit strategy, and this is crucial for our company's success. The marketing team has been laying the groundwork for sales by generating leads, building brand awareness, creating educational resources, study cases, etc. 

Could you share your strategic vision and approach for propelling Conversica to even greater heights in the coming years?

Like any company that is riding a hype wave, the wave will end. I believe we are starting to see that with G AI and the hype behind Chat GPT. Having been through this with mobile and social, we are looking way behind the hype and focusing the application of these technologies on areas where our customer base feels pain in the funnel.

In fact, a recent survey that Conversica commissioned showed that 65% of companies said may have AI-powered services in place within a year. Also, the study revealed within the next year, business leaders said they intend to use AI for 'external engagement,' i.e., customer service/support and marketing/sales outreach (39%), which are the types of solutions we offer. These trends present a great opportunity for Conversica to reach even greater heights in the near future.